J'Ack-ooze Ass

J'Ack-ooze Ass

J'accuse Ass is an irregular department. It recognizes a public accusation, complaint, insinuation, alarm, or whining notable for its arrogance, irrelevance, spite, stridence, obtuseness, or mendacity.

The inaugural J'Accuse Ass is appropriately French-looking and horse-faced: Senator John F. "Band of Mongols" Kerry.

On 27 February, Senator Kerry was asked by the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle why he says he was misled into voting to authorize the President to go to war to remove Saddam Hussein. Kerry explained that he thought he was voting to bind Bush to a UN time table, to make it "harder to go to war".

Why did he say this when Bush had told the UN that its credibility as a peacekeeper depended on its enforcing the 16 Security Council resolutions requiring Saddam to disarm? Because the word among Washington insiders was that Bush didn't mean what he said, that he was only trying to placate the war hawks at the Pentagon and really wanted to go with the accommodationist follow-the-U.N. faction at State.

In other words, Kerry claims that a vote to attack is a vote to restrain an attack and that Bush misled Kerry by doing what he said he would do. Such ineffectual strategic subtlety is not what we want in a Commander in Chief, and perhaps explains why Kerry has gotten no legislation through the Senate.

Kerry isn't the only Democrat who thinks like this. Senator Jay Rockefeller's insists that Bush got us into Iraq by falsely claiming that Saddam posed an imminent threat. Well, yes, Rockefeller admits, Bush said just the opposite, that in an age of terrorism we can't afford to wait until a threat is imminent. But not saying that there is an imminent threat "is talking about the danger of an immediate attack . . . if the word imminent threat wasn't used, that was the predicate; that was the feeling that was given to the American people and to the Congress".

I've said it before: Liberals live in a different world and want to make the rest of us live there, too. To that end, they will believe whatever makes what they say "true". So when Bush says A and does A, when the Democrats want him to do B, they claim he was lying when he said A. And that's "true for them".